Two blows in luxury hotels in Madrid in the same afternoon and escape in a hurry by plane... even with the safe on top. Agents of the National Police have arrested a man, a 53-year-old Mauritanian with a history of similar events, at the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid-Barajas airport when he tried to escape, presumably to the Canary Islands, after stealing in rooms of two establishments on Gran Vía, in the Centro district of the capital, expensive clothes, luxury goods, computers and jewelry worth 172,000 to a group of young Canadians and a Swiss tourist.
According to a police spokesman, this film robbery began at eight thirty on the night of Wednesday, May 17 and was solved just two and a half hours later with the arrest in extremis of the alleged thief when he already had almost one foot outside Madrid. At that time, a group of 10 Canadian tourists aged between 33 and 20 years returned to the luxury aparthotel where they were staying on Gran Vía to find the door burst and the room, revolted. The friends, who had arrived in the capital from Ibiza, missed many of their belongings and the safe in which they had put the most valuable, such as a Rolex, cash and their passports. The robbery, they reported, had occurred between half past eight and half past nine at night.
The police hastily assembled a device, which the first thing they did was to see the security cameras of the aparthotel. And there it was: in the images you could see how a suspect left about the time of the robbery of the room "loaded with three giant suitcases". The hotel workers remember him and say that he even "came to ask one of them for help to watch a suitcase while he took out the others." The man took a taxi and left in a hurry, so the police mounted a device throughout Madrid to locate, with special attention to the stations and the airport. The electronic devices he had stolen gave the agents his position: he was going to Barajas, specifically, to T-4. The agents of the district police station alerted those at the airport, and the latter managed to locate the alleged perpetrator at the airport bus station, where he was arrested around eleven o'clock at night.
The agents asked for the documentation and verified that it was a man from Mauritania who has "a history of robbery with force and other crimes in the Canary Islands", so they suspect that he was heading back to the archipelago. The suspect "managed to get away from the agents and tried to escape through one of the doors of the station," but his escape attempt lasted barely 100 meters.
List of stolen objects that were found in the luggage of the detainee in Barajas on the past day 17.NATIONAL POLICE
Once arrested, the agents opened the suitcases, which contained all the material he had stolen in the robbery, as well as other objects that the Canadians did not recognize as theirs. Among what was his was a Louis Vuittonpurse worth 27,500 euros, a Dior bag of 10,000, a Rolex of 20,000, clothes and branded glasses, electronic devices and other objects worth about 170,000. Part of this loot was inside the safe, which the thief could not or did not want to open and took it in one of the suitcases.
Who owned the remainder? The agents found another robbery that fit, being the same modus operandi: the afternoon of that same day 17, a Swiss tourist had filed a complaint at the Retiro police station for a robbery in his hotel room, also located on Gran Vía and very close to the previous one. The victim said that he had gone out to dinner and, on the way back, the door of his room was broken and there was no trace of his things. He was missing two laptops and other personal effects worth about 2,000 euros, which all appeared in the suitcases of the same thief. He was arrested as the alleged perpetrator of two crimes of robbery with force and brought to justice.
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